October 2005

Frustration with IE 6

October 15, 2005

It has been a frustrating day trying to deal with the CSS bugs in Internet Explorer. This site shows up nicely in Firefox, Safari and other browsers using CSS style sheets to handle the display. However if you're looking at this site in Internet Explorer 6 the sidebar doesn't show up. The bmannconsulting.com site has the same problem (and is another Drupal site). Is there something in the default Drupal .css that causes this or is it some oddity of IE we're left to battle on our own. It might be necessary to re-design the CSS with the advice from webreference.com. Something to do this evening I guess.

Sandy Internet Superhighway

October 15, 2005

Today was a banner day for me here in Iraq. I just got an internet connection installed in my CHU and I got a mattress to sleep on. I had been waiting hours for 20 minutes on a public connection and had been sleeping on plywood covered with a thin "therma-rest" type camping mattress. Let's here it for progress!

Now that I have a connection in my room I highly recommend that those of you who do not have Yahoo or AOL instant messenger go ahead and get that service. Its free and will be the best way for me to chat with you. My screen name is rotoravi8r on AOL and on Yahoo. I am 7-8 hours ahead of most of you.

The past few days have been relative quiet here for me. I hitched a ride on a recent flight as a passenger just to see what the flying environment is like. We flew all over northern Iraq without incident. Bagdad is really cool looking from the air with night vision goggles. The goggles keep you from really seeing the destruction so the city appears to be quite beautiful. I hope to be in the pilot seat soon. The guys who have started flying are flying a lot and I expect to get a lot of hours as well.

I am getting used to the routine and to my accomodations. I will send pictures in the next few days.

Reality distortion?

October 13, 2005

Over at Slate Jack Shafer criticizes media that "salute every shiny gadget " Apple produces. In the complaint he goes on to say "At least the techie readers of Engadget, free of the Apple mind-meld, recognize the V-iPod[sic] as a deliberately crippled by copy protection, low-res, underpowered video appliance that is merely Apple's first try in the emerging market of video players."

Funny. It has been at least a few months since the same things were said about an Apple release. Remember all the claims of "ho-hum", "tired", "been there" quotes that the "knowledgeable" people had to say about the iPod Shuffle. All the while the horribly incorrect mainstream media reported what consumers said. At the end of the day, or in this case the fiscal year, it turns out to be Apple that is laughing all the way to the bank as long as they can keep the diminutive blockbusters on the shelf.

It's funny that the "knowledgeable" folks who will be rushing out in a year to buy the product that average consumers have found to be fantastic.

The editorial eye

October 11, 2005

In commenting on Yahoo News search Dave Winer suggests "Blogs don't belong in the margin, they belong in the main results."

Looking through a search presents some problems with this idea. An average search shows several copies of results of posts from this blog repeated on several other spamertising blogs. This means that to decide which blogs should be included an editorial decision needs to be made on the part of the information provider. An offhand suggestion says perhaps you go to the first copy of the post as authoritative. However this will just cause the illegitimate sites to backdate their posts to appear to be the original.

Rapidly this becomes an area where the authority of the editor becomes important. With the New York Times for example I'm able to judge from many volumes of history what I think of their editorial policies. How do we learn to apply that same judgement to collections of personal publications?

Robot race

October 9, 2005

"NO DRIVR" reads the ontario license plate. "driven by Mac OS X" reads the fender of one Volkswagen Toureg. In comes another dust-covered Toureg with its play on the familiar Volkswagen line "Drivers not needed," the rear fender proclaims. Indeed it is almost correct. The vehicle has just become the first to traverse the 132-mile course with only a computer at the controls. Though it has logged more than a thousand miles in training its artificial intelligence system, the 132 that it logged on Saturday are historic.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 2005 Grand Challenge filled the parking lot behind Buffalo Bills' in Primm, Nevada this weekend. I snapped a few photos of the first vehicles to complete the 132-mile desert course. In contrast to the 2004 Grand Challenge where the top teams managed only seven miles, 22 of the 23 finalists surpassed the seven-mile mark. Five teams finished the entire 132-mile course this year, although only four finished in the alloted 10-hour timeframe. 43 teams went to the National Qualification Event over the last two weeks. The teams competing had bots ranging in size from Blue Team's diminutive Ghostrider Robot a motorcycle based platform to the 16-ton green machine TerraMax.

Stanford's Stanley, a Volkswagen Toureg, completed the course in 6 hours 53 minutes and 58 seconds to win the challenge's $2 million purse.

Night Qualification

October 8, 2005

I flew last night from about 2300 - 0030. It was my first flight in the desert with night vision goggles. It was simply an introduction to this type of flying. It was a great flght. I have only had a handful of flights since I started this craazy endeavor where I walked away feeling like I was really on top of everything. This was one of them. Everything clicked. The crew worked together seamlessly. The desert was beautiful in the green glow of the goggles and I enjoyed moving along 100 feet above the sand. As expected, I had to watch the instruments very closely to be sure I was not climbing or descending because there are no visual references to let you know altitude, especially under goggles. Whenever I saw a vehicle driving across the desert I would, for practice, treat it as potentially hostile. We would avoid a direct overflight. The door gunners, also for practice, would announce "hostile fire from the vehicle, suppressing!" and then make machine gun sounds over the intercom. We got into a contest to see who could make the best impression of the door gun. It was a fun flight but with a very serious purpose. The more I work were these guys the more confident I am in the team that is going to Iraq. Other than the occassional flight life has been uneventful. The Kuwaiti evenings are cool enough to go running so Ive been getting 3 to 6 miles in each night. Ive also been going to the gym most days. The rest of the time is still spent mostly waiting for meals and sitting around the tent. I think we are all ready to move on to our more permanant homes.

Photos

October 7, 2005

Here are some promised photos. They are from the trip over here and from some of the time we have spent in kuwait. The one behind the fence is from out stop-over in germany when we were waiting for the plane to be serviced. The one of me in the dark is in Kuwait waiting for the bus after we got off the plane. I think the others are self-explanatory.

Range

October 4, 2005

We spent about 6 hours at the shooting range yesterday. It was basically an empty spot in the desert with targets and sandbags. Very different from the highly controlled and cooridated shooting ranges back home. The idea was for everyone to get familiar with their weapons. We had 9 mm handgun, M-4 rifles and the 7.622 M-240 (this is the door gunner's machine gun. the rounds are the same as those in a .208 hunting rifle for those of you who care).

My rifle had some mechanical issues at first. Needless to say there was sand everywhere. After some tinkering, however, it worked pretty well considering the circumstances. From what I understand the 204s worked great. We all had a pretty good time shooting but got really hot and dehydrated standing out in the midafternoon desert sun. Everyone was ready to get back to the tent when the range time ended. We then spent a few more hours cleaning weapons before everyone passed out in the refrigerated comfort of the tent.

A new public radio station

October 3, 2005

I've recently begun listening a lot to KQED. The Bay Area's excellent radio station offers many benefits over Las Vegas' KNPR. One of the biggest is that it is possible to listen throughout a day and not hear the same story repeated ad-noseum. With KNPR it's gotten tough because four hours a day are filled with the local programing but it's not four hours a day worth. In fact it's not even two. They run the same segments during Morning Edition, and then again a few hours later, and in All Things Considered, and then again repeated in the State of Nevada. All and all not a terribly productive use of time.

Unlike many of the NPR affiliates KQED has an mp3 stream. This is important as I now have the stream in iTunes not in yet another poor third-party media player. Sure I could launch something like Real Player but why? Best of all it works great with Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro - time shifting radio is really here. Now the programs I can't find time for on the weekend shift nicely into drive time podcasts.

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